104: Little, Big
What happens if you sprinkle late-19th-century-British fairy dust all over 20th-century upstate New York? What do you call it when a multi-generational family saga and a sweeping fate-of-the-world fantasy novel collide with 70s-style quote-unquote postmodernism? How many layers of meta-narrative…
91: Algernon Blackwood
What’s so scary about trees, shrubs and untamed landscapes? How come so many turn-of-the-20th-century weird fiction writers were reactionary bigots? And why are they now being summoned from the crypts of genre history and niche publication to walk the earth…
88: The Last Man
It’s the end of the world as we know it! It’s the end of good writing as even the 1820s knew it! But we feel fine: it’s the beginning of science fiction. The Sometime Seminar discusses The Last Man (1826), a…
82: Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Sometime Seminar discusses Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), a mysterious novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay which was adapted into a film directed by Peter Weir (1975). Download this episode
59: The Colour out of Space
How much repetition-with-variation does it take to turn a schtick into a genre? What elevates trashy horror pulp to the stature of GREAT trashy horror pulp? And if we know that the thing behind the door is an eldritch horror…
50: Autobiography of a Corpse
Connoisseurs of negation, travelers from the land of pure being, Stygian toads that know they don’t exist, and a literary gift on the order of Kafka or Borges—wonders abound as the Sometime Seminar discusses Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of…
49: The White People
The Sometime Seminar discusses the fantastic, in both senses, horror story “The White People” (1899) by Arthur Machen, along with other stories: “The Great God Pan” (1890), “A Fragment of Life” (1904), “The Great Return” (1915). Apart from “The Great God…
48: The Slynx
Puns, pratfalls, mutants, peasants, mutant peasants, existential dread, verbal invention, narrative non-invention, and a perhaps excessive dose of Cold-War-liberal-dissident nostalgia. Plus the tragic tale of the Gingerbread Man! The Sometime Seminar discusses The Slynx (Russian 2000/English 2003), a bleakly comic post-apocalyptic story…
46: eXistenZ
Mysterious assassins, grisly excrescences, metacinematic reflexivity, and metaphysical doubt as paranoid comedy–all this and a heaping bowl of mutated amphibians as the Sometime Seminar discusses eXistenZ (1999), a science-fiction film written and directed by David Cronenberg. Download this episode
42: The Southern Reach Trilogy
How many forms of uncanny weirdness can you cram into one trilogy? Can the Netflix model of binge consumption work for novels as well as TV shows? And should you settle for a mystery when you could have a mythos?…
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